Newberry's Head Bookworm

Since before he could read, she escorted him weekly to the public library near their suburban Cincinnati home. He found refuge there. The only place with equal draw was the golf course.

No Tiger Woods, he pursued a career in academia, working most recently as president and then professor of history at Lake Forest College. This fall his passion for the stacks will gain more single-minded attention when he starts work as the Newberry Library's president and librarian Oct. 1.

"There are library people, and I'm just one of them. I love being in libraries," he says.

Mr. Spadafora, 54, admits he is not a librarian per se. His doctorate, from Yale University, was in history. But he knows Newberry, the humanities research institution on the Near North Side, intimately after a teaching and research fellowship there three years ago.

At Lake Forest he was a teacher as well as administrator. From 1993 to 2001, when he served as the liberal arts college's president, he integrated the library and the information technology office as a means of bringing research into the 21st Century. He was also a successful fundraiser - a core duty for any college president - building the Lake Forest endowment from about $40 million to $60 million, about the same size as Newberry's today.

Independent, non-profit Newberry reported $10.4 million in expenses in fiscal 2004. Direct public support is uneven, wavering between $3.9 million in fiscal 2002 to $5.9 million last year, according to recent library tax filings.

The library is "undercapitalized," Mr. Spadafora says, and needs additional donations. In an age when the number of information outlets for scholars and lay researchers is unprecedented, he also wants to improve "marketing" for the 118-year-old library overlooking Bughouse Square.

Another priority is completing the ongoing computerization of the library's card catalog, though full-scale electronic scanning of its rare holdings is not something the library can afford, he says. On a personal level, "I would much rather read the books than I would read from a screen."

He replaced Charles Cullen, who will step down this fall after 19 years at the library. During his earlier Newberry fellowship he watched the way library staff handled visitors, from professional scholars to layperson walk-ins, and was impressed that both received attentive treatment. While it may never draw tour buses like the Art Institute, he'd like to heighten the library's profile on the Chicago cultural landscape.

"We tend to think of our cultural treasures as museums," he says. "This is not a museum, but it is a cultural treasure."